Dr. med.
Walter Heinemann
1883 - 1968

“I, Walter Heinemann, was born on August 16, 1883, in Braunschweig, son of the merchant Berthold Heinemann and his wife Fanny, née Kunstmann. I am of jewish faith. After attending Dr. Jahn’s private school in Braunschweig from Michaelis (September) 1889 to Michaelis 1892, I entered the Herzogliches Neues Gymnasium [now Wilhelm-Gymnasium Braunschweig, note: H Je] there, which I left in Michaelis 1901 with a certificate of maturity. I devoted myself to the study of medicine and studied from Michaelis 1901 to April 1904 at the University of Berlin, where I passed my preliminary medical examination in February 1904. After studying for one semester in Munich, I completed my studies in Berlin until Michaelis 1906. I passed the state medical examination on March 25, 1907,” Walter Heinemann stated in his CV within in his dissertation. In July 1907, he received his MD by the Faculty of Medicine, University of Leipzig, with his thesis “Ueber Hemiatrophia faciei” (On Hemiatrophia faciei). He completed this thesis at the suggestion and with the support of the Berlin neurologist Kurt Mendel. Kurt Mendel was influenced by his father, the well known neurologist and psychiatrist Emanuel Mendel, who headed a renowned polyclinic for his field in Berlin and taught at the University of Berlin. In April 1908, Heinemann received his medical license.

Education and Place of Work

As a medical intern, he worked for six months at the Institute of Pathology of the Berlin Municipal Hospital in Moabit and at the Medical Department of the Rudolf Virchow Hospital (RVK) in Berlin under Alfred Goldscheider. He then moved to work as a trainee and later as an assistant physician under Georg Jochmann, who, as a specialist in internal medicine at the RVK in Berlin, headed the Infectious Diseases Department. In 1909, Heinemann and Robert Koch had brief direct working contact at the RVK’s tuberculosis research ward in connection with studies on the Piquet skin reaction. Together with Bernhard Möllers, Robert Koch’s last personal assistant, Heinemann published on the gastric application of tuberculin preparations. His initial focus was on questions in the field of bacteriology. Since 1910 he was working under Leopold Kuttner, who had taken over the position of a Medical Director of the First Medical Clinic at the RVK. This cooperation had a significant impact on Heinemanns medical orientation. Kuttner—at that time, alongside Ismar Boas, Hermann Strauß, and Theodor Rosenheim, the leading specialist in gastroenterology in Berlin—awakened Heinemann’s interest in this new field of medicine. After completing his internal medicine training, Heinemann worked for a short time at the Department of Surgery at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin under Ferdinand Karewski to gain insight into “minor surgery.”

In February 1912, Walter Heinemann initially established himself as a general practitioner in his hometown of Braunschweig. Shortly thereafter, in 1914, he converted the practice into a specialized practice for gastrointestinal and metabolic diseases, including an X-ray laboratory.

During his training with Leopold Kuttner, Heinemann became early and intensively involved with X-ray diagnostics of the gastrointestinal tract, particularly X-ray imaging of the gallbladder. The then-new X-ray technique allowed for the first time the visualization of the gallbladder and any calculi present.

His practice was interrupted by the First World War. At the beginning of the war, he was able to work as a “contracted civilian doctor” in a reserve hospital in Braunschweig and partially continue his practice.

In February 1916, Heinemann married Elsa Johanna Herz, who came from a family of a banker in Braunschweig. In 1917, his daughter Eva Sophie was born, and in 1919, son Fritz Hugo was born.

Heinemann served in the war as a medical officer on the Somme in France, in Flanders, and in the Carpathian Mountains October 1916 to 1918. His medical practice in Braunschweig quickly developed successfully since 1919, particularly due to his specialization in gastroenterology and the extensive use of X-ray diagnostics. The practice had a wide catchment area with a large circle of referring physicians extending well beyond the Braunschweig region.

Walter Heinemann was active in the Braunschweig District and State Medical Association and contributed to continuing education with his own lectures. He was also involved as a representative in the work of his hometown’s Jewish community and, in 1932 he was elected chairman of the community, succeeding Norbert Regensburger. Heinemann held this position until his escape to Palestine in early November 1935. He actively campaigned for reforms. He achieved voting rights for the non-German Jewish community members who had moved there and for women in the Braunschweig Jewish community. He also assumed the chairmanship of the Leopold Zunz Lodge in Braunschweig.

In the 1920s, Walter Heinemann was particularly committed to the establishment of a progressive educational experimental work school and a school camp. He played a leading role in drafting the statutes for this institution (1926). He also assumed the office of chairman of the “School Association of the Braunschweig Experimental School”.

1933

In the then “Free State of Braunschweig” antisemitic incidents had already occurred in the 1920s. In the 1930 elections, the National Socialists received 22% of the vote and were henceforth part of a coalition government. Heinemann was witness of the Nazi boycott of Jewish doctors’ practices on April 1, 1933. The patients within the statutory health insurance companies were revoked from Heinemanns practice. He was forced to work only in private practice. The result was a loss of patients. Patients were no longer referred by the “Aryan” colleagues.

As a Jew, Heinemann was arbitrarily arrested by the Nazis on April 13, 1933, and held for six days in so-called protective custody in the Braunschweig District and Remand Prison. His release followed the intervention of internist Adolf Bingel, who was chief physician of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Ducal Hospital in Braunschweig since 1910. He was a friend of Walter Heinemann. The Bingel daughter Gertrud (Trudchen) was a girlfriend of Eva Heinemann. The Heinemann family supported the Bingel family with care packages from New York following the end of Second World War 1945.

Heinemann, with clarity and foresight, foresaw the consequences of the Nazi policies early on and expressed them in numerous letters to prominent Jewish representatives. When it became known that Jewish physicians and scientists had to leave professional societies and were deprived of their editorships of scientific journals, he pleaded in letters from August 1933 to Rabbi Leo Baeck and surgeon Paul Rosenstein at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, among others, for the rapid establishment of a separate German-Jewish Medical Weekly within the Cultural Association of German Jews (Letters regarding the creation of a Jewish scientific journal 1933 – 1935, Walter Heinemann Collection, Leo Baeck Institute New York , AR 865). Heinemann’s proposal was unsuccessful.

His son, Fritz Hugo Heinemann, born in 1919, was sent to France at the end of 1933 for his protection and to continue his education in school. In Paris, the son found his aunt Valseska, his father’s sister, who had moved to Paris from Germany with her husband, Ernst Heymann, in 1932. For Fritz Heinemann, continuing to attend school in Braunschweig had become unbearable due to anti-semitic attacks. [He would later travel to England and, in January 1939, to the USA. From then on, he called himself Peter Hart. After Second World War, he would return to England and work as a publisher in London.] Heinemanns daughter, Eva Sophie, born in 1917, left Braunschweig on June 1, 1934, “because attending school there was no longer reasonable for her,” as Heinemann wrote in his 1953 compensation claim (Lower Saxony State Archives, Compensation File, Volume 1, Page 3). She found refuge in Great Britain and was able to work as an au pair for british relatives.

Heinemann was forced to give up his practice in Braunschweig in 1935, to sell his practice equipment and his apartment furniture, including the Blüthner grand piano, and to leave Germany.

Escape via Palestine and England to the USA 1935/36.

Officially deregistered in Braunschweig on November 7, 1935, 52-year-old Walter Heinemann and his 81-year-old mother first traveled to Paris and then from Marseille to Haifa, Palestine, on the S.S. Mariette Pacha. He had obtained a visa for entry to Palestine by the British Consulate in Berlin. Over the next six months he realized that his goal of establishing a lucrative medical practice in Tel Aviv/Jaffa was unrealistic. Heinemann’s mother, Fanny, returned from Palestine to Braunschweig via Paris after a short time. Walter Heinemann himself briefly moved to England, met his wife and daughter in London, received an affidavit for the USA, and arrived in New York from Southampton on June 7, 1936, on the transatlantic ship Georgic of the British Cunard White Star Line. His wife, Elsa Heinemann, followed him from England to New York on the SS Bremen in December 1936. His daughter, Eva Heinemann, also arrived in the USA from Southampton on July 15, 1937, also on the SS Bremen, and worked as a nurse at New York Hospital (now Weill Cornell Medical Center).

After passing language exams and the American medical exam, Walter Heinemann received a medical license in New York State and opened a private practice in 1937.

He was granted the title of Specialist in Gastroenterology and also established an X-ray laboratory in his practice. He was able to have his X-ray equipment shipped from Germany to the USA. At the same time, Heinemann initially worked as a volunteer at Sydenham Hospital in Harlem in 1937, which primarily cared for members of New York’s African-American community. Later, he worked in the gastrointestinal outpatient section of the Department of Internal Medicine at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital, New York City, and published “Critical Considerations on the Appendicitis Question” with Zachary Sagal in Gastroenterologia in 1940.

Subsequently, Heinemann was able to work as an assistant adjunct alongside his private practice at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in Upper Manhattan.

Heinemann continued his institutional involvement in New York. In the early 1950s, he was elected to the board of the Rudolf Virchow Medical Society in New York. In New York, Heinemann met numerous internists who had fled Germany, including Leopold Lichtwitz and Rudolf Stern, the father of the German-American historian Fritz Stern.

In 1960, Heinemann visited his hometown of Braunschweig. Five years later, he returned to Bad Wiessee, Germany, for spa treatment.

Walter Heinemann died at the age of 85 on August 14, 1968, at St. Luke’s Hospital Center Manhattan in New York. His grave is in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York. A short obituary appeared in the Scarsdale Inquirer newspaper of August 22, 1968, noting Heinemann’s medical studies in Berlin and his involvement with the Leo Baeck Chapter of the B’nai B’rith Lodge in New York. His wife, Elsa Heinemann, died in New York in 1989.

Walter Heinemann’s 87-year-old mother, Fanny, née Kunstmann, his 59-year-old brother Ludwig, and his sister-in-law lost their lives in Holland on June 13, 1941, during a British air raid on the city of Gouda. Fanny Heinemann, the mother, had moved from Braunschweig to Hanover to join her son Ludwig after the November pogrom 1938, and fled together with him from Germany to the Netherlands.

Walter Heinemann’s nephew and son of his brother Ludwig, Fritz Adolf Heinemann, was arrested by the Gestapo in Holland, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there at the age of 20 on February 28, 1943.

Walter Heinemann’s sister, Valeska (born 1885), married Ernst Heymann, a Frankfurt-based chemical and pharmaceutical entrepreneur, and moved with him to Paris in 1932. From there, she came to the USA in 1937, lived in Los Angeles, and became a well-known photographer under the name Lette Valeska. She died at a very advanced age in Los Angeles in 1985. Her photographic works were honored with an impressive exhibition in Braunschweig in 2023.

In Braunschweig, stumbling blocks in front of the house and practice at Bruchtorwall 1 commemorate Walter Heinemann’s family.

Research into Walter Heinemann’s biography led to an examination of his memoirs, written in the 1950s. The typescript had been stored for decades at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and has been digitized and is available online without commentary. In the context of the DGVS memorial page for Heinemann, the idea arose to publish these memoirs with detailed commentary and illustrations in collaboration with the Braunschweig City Archives. The book will be published at the end of October 2025: Walter Heinemann, Auf dem Schreibtisch der Braunschweiger Löwe. Lebenserinnerungen eines jüdischen Arztes (On the Desk of the Braunschweig Lion: Memoirs of a Jewish Doctor). Edited by Meike Buck, Harro Jenss, Benjamin Kuntz. Series: Braunschweiger Werkstücke; Volume 126. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.